Counties Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, which formed the northern and eastern part of the province of Connaught, stretching from the River Shannon to the Atlantic, were geographically remote and economically backward in the early modern period. Much of Roscommon was inhospitable - projectors earlier in the century found that even Scottish settlers refused to rent land in some parts of the county. CSP Ire. 1606-8, pp. 9, 131, 146. The surveyors of the mid-1650s dismissed large areas of Sligo and Leitrim as ‘in general coarse and wet’. Civil Survey, x. 93-4, 96-7. The assessment rates set during the Cromwellian protectorate give an impression of the relative economic position of the three counties: throughout the decade Roscommon, rated at little more than £500 for three months, was expected to yield nearly twice as much tax as Sligo, while Leitrim came a poor third. An Assessment for Ire. (Dublin, 1654, 1655, 1657, 1659); A. and O. Across the region the only towns of importance were Sligo, to the west, and Athlone, on the River Shannon, and with their garrisons, these towns formed the most obvious government presence in an area otherwise dominated by the native Irish. CSP Ire. 1606-8, p. xl.
Politically, the three counties were deeply divided. In the early seventeenth century Leitrim ‘was left for the most part to the power and greatness of the chief of the O'Rourkes’. CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 16. The attainder of the head of the O’Rourke clan allowed an English plantation in Leitrim from 1617, which attracted existing Connaught settlers such as Sir Charles Coote senior, who built the walled stronghold of Jamestown in the early 1620s. CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 166, 310, 313, 336, 448-9; 1647-60, p. 82. The appointment of commissioners for the county in 1627 shows that, by this time, members of the Hamilton, Crofton, St George and Parsons families had already joined the Cootes as investors in Leitrim. CSP Ire. 1625-32, p. 253. Although not subjected to a formal plantation, Sligo was also coming under the influence of incomers, who owned perhaps half the land-area of the county by 1641. In addition, there had been various abortive schemes to plant Sligo in 1628 and 1631, as well as that implemented by Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) in 1635; but even the last had little impact on land-owning in the area, which remained divided between English, Old English and Gaelic interests. CSP Ire. 1625-32, p. 606; 1647-60, p. 128; Strafforde Letters, i. 444; M. O’Dowd, Power, Politics and Land: Early Modern Sligo, 1568-1688 (Belfast, 1991), 89-105. Roscommon differed from Sligo and Leitrim not in the amount of land held by the English (by purchase and by plantation after 1635), but by the decision of many newcomers to live there. The presence of Sir Robert King* at Boyle Abbey, Viscount Ranelagh (Sir Roger Jones) at Roscommon Castle, the St Georges at Carrick-on-Shannon, and the Cootes at Castle Coote, as well as the strength of the fort and garrison at Athlone, made Roscommon appear more stable than the outlying counties. Civil Survey, i. passim. The returns for the Irish Parliament in 1634 and 1640 show that political influence often lagged behind these changes in land ownership: the County Leitrim seats went to the New English, notably the Cootes and Croftons; County Sligo was held first by Gaelic and then Old English landowners; while County Roscommon returned members of the Old English Dillon family as a matter of course, except in 1634, when Ranelagh’s son, Arthur Jones*, was elected for one of the seats. McGrath, Biographical Dict.; H. Kearney, Strafford in Ire. (Cambridge 1989), 247-9.
Despite their differences, the three counties shared a similar fate during the wars of the 1640s and early 1650s. The Irish rebellion, which had started in Ulster in late October 1641, had spread south and west into Leitrim, Sligo and Roscommon by mid-November. CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 346. The Cootes held their castles in County Roscommon, Ranelagh fortified Athlone, Sir Frederick Hamilton and other Sligo and Leitrim settlers resisted as best they could; and all waited in vain for a relieving army from Dublin. In late 1642, with supplies exhausted, Ranelagh was forced to make a local treaty with the Irish rebels, and this was continued by the country-wide cessation of arms in September 1643. But the king’s insistence on making ever greater concessions to the Catholics, and his imposition of Lords Dillon and Taaffe as joint presidents over Connaught from 1644, encouraged key figures such as the younger Sir Charles Coote* and Sir Robert King to defect to Parliament, and undermined the royalist hold over the region in general. During the spring of 1646 Coote, aided by Sir Robert King and other local landowners, was able to reinforce Roscommon and other strongholds, and, in the words of one Dublin commentator, by May ‘Sir Charles Coote hath marched where he pleased in the counties of Galway and Roscommon without resistance’. Bodl. Carte 16, ff. 457, 469, 495; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 454; HMC Egmont, i. 292. The defeat of the Ulster Scots at Benburb in June changed all this. As Thomas Preston’s Confederate army invaded from the south, Roscommon, Boyle and Carrick-on-Shannon fell within a matter of weeks, and Coote was forced to flee to Belfast. Bodl. Carte 18, ff. 27, 76; HMC Egmont, i. 303-4. For the next six years, most areas in counties Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon were controlled by the Catholic Confederates.
Connaught was the last of the four provinces to fall to the Cromwellians in the early 1650s. A combined operation between the New Model army and the Old Protestant forces overran the eastern area in the spring of 1652, while Sir Charles Coote, advancing from the north, quickly recaptured Sligo town and the Roscommon garrisons before pushing on to besiege Galway. Bodl. Firth c.5, f. 52v. From the summer of 1652, Coote resumed his role as lord president of Connaught, and he soon stamped his authority over the three counties. At first he was able to exert direct pressure through billeting several regiments on the region, and, after the disbandment of the summer of 1653, he instituted a deliberate policy of settling old soldiers in the area. The commission appointed to set out Sligo lands for soldiers’ arrears in January 1654 included many of Coote’s officers, and most of the land in the county was allocated to men from the regiments of Sir Charles and Richard Coote. Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 391; O’Dowd, Sligo, 132-4. In addition, a reserved area around the town of Sligo was added to already sizeable Connaught estate of another prominent government supporter, Sir Robert King, in 1656. Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 573. In early 1654, the government ordered that Leitrim was to be withheld from the transplantation scheme, along with a strip of Roscommon land along the Shannon, and in 1656 this area was among the land allocated to those claiming pre-1649 arrears – the details of disposal being decided by a commission which included Coote and King. Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 388, 555, 565. Roscommon was mostly assigned to the transplanted Irish, but the area of land available was reduced by the preservation of existing settler estates, the reservation of the Shannon strip, and the practice of Coote, among others, of buying up land from the incoming Irish natives. Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 566-7; J. Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: the Transplantation to Connacht, 1649-1680 (Woodbridge, 2011), 104-8. As a result, some areas remained in the hands of the Old Protestants: for example, the barony of Boyle in northern Roscommon did not see an influx of disbanded New Model soldiers, rather an increase in the holdings of long-established families, such as the Cootes, Kings, Croftons and St Georges, at the expense of the native landowners. Civil Survey, i. 130-66. The continuing influence of the Old Protestants can be seen in the assessment commissions appointed in 1654 and 1655: the army officers were heavily outnumbered by the old families, with Sir Charles Coote being appointed to serve for all three counties. An Assessment for Ire. (Dublin, 1654, 1655).
The parliamentary elections, held at Jamestown, reflect this unequal division of influence in the region. CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 800. In 1654 Sir Robert King was returned with the veteran Anglo-Irish politician, Sir John Temple. The surviving indenture, dated 28 July, suggests that this was something of a compromise between the Old Protestant landowners and the locally-based Cromwellian officers: although the presiding sheriff, Sir George St George, was himself a local landowner, and the signatories included such prominent Old Protestants as Sir Charles and Richard Coote, Robert Parke*, Richard Crofton, John Lambert and James King, others named on the indenture include two radical English officers – Alexander Brayfield, lieutenant-colonel of Daniel Axtell’s* regiment and governor of Athlone, and John Disbrowe, major of Daniel Abbott’s* regiment – and the more moderate figure of Samuel Shephard, major of Sir John Reynolds’s* regiment. C219/44, unfol.; P. Little, ‘Irish Representation in the Protectorate Parliaments’, PH xxiii. 343. Details of the election in 1656 are lacking, but the return of Sir Robert King with Colonel John Bridges, a close ally of Henry Cromwell*, suggests that the influence of the radical army officers had receded.
The death of Sir Robert King in 1657 altered the situation once again. In the election for Richard Cromwell’s Parliament*, held at Jamestown on 13 January 1659, the ‘freeholders of the several counties’ elected the Leitrim landowner, Robert Parke, and a carpet-bagger, Thomas Waller of Gray’s Inn. Parke had served in Sir Charles Coote’s regiment of foot in the 1640s and early 1650s, and his return was presumably on the Coote interest. Waller’s election was more problematic. The second seat appears to have been in the gift of Sir John King, who had originally put forward ‘a friend of his’; but on the intervention of Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) he had been persuaded to arrange the election Waller instead. Broghill had been acting on the recommendation of Secretary John Thurloe*, who was keen to secure seats from government supporters. TSP vii. 593, 597, 600. The dominance of the Old Protestant clique in eastern Connaught was confirmed in the returns for the General Convention which met in Dublin in March 1660, with members of the Coote, King, Crofton, Gorges and Parke families taking the county seats. Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 224-8. After the restoration of the king, Sir Charles Coote, now earl of Mountrath, was able to secure pardons for his friends and confirm the land gains of his officers. CSP Ire. 1660-2, pp. 188, 243. In the 1661 elections for the Irish Parliament, the Old Protestants remained firmly in charge. CJI i. 591-3.
